home IPv6 – the journey begins

I’ve been interested in IPv6 for years. I actually wanted to play with it when I was at SDSC (1993-2003), but there was never time and the software support was too brittle.

Boy, have things changed. And for the better. Of course, my ISP doesn’t offer IPv6 connectivity; few do, and none in my area, at least for home service. I’m happy with my DSL connection, and the free static IP addresses that I have. Since I could practically throw a rock at the CO (I can see if from my house!), I have the theoretical maximum DSL speed available if I want it.

With no native IPv6 connectivity available, obviously a tunnel is the solution. I’ve spoken to the nice folks at Hurricane Electric over the past few months about GigE-level IPv6 connectivity for work, so I decided to give their tunnel server a try.

I completely configured an IPv6 tunnel from my home server and tested IPv6 connectivity on my home LAN and to the Internet tonight. In about 30 minutes. And a lot of that time was figuring out the new syntax of the Linux networking tools (route, netstat, etc.) for IPv6.

I was able to reconfigure my home router (WRT54G), and then build the tunnel from the home Ubuntu server to Hurricane Electric‘s tunnel broker with no trouble at all.

I was able to verify IPv6 connectivity via ping6, traceroute6 and even made some SSH connections on IPv6.

Next challenge: see the @#$(*& dancing turtle at www.kame.net on my MacBook Pro. There’s something truly odd about the IP stack here and it’ll take some time to sort that out.